Compulsive disclosure never gets as good as in the verses of a Robert Earl Keen song. The man has a lot of words at his disposal, and he uses them well. The storylines play out, each step is given its due and Robert Earl Keen gives every footfall a reason for landing. The lines rumble on but they never ramble, in Robert’s hands the bit players, and their decisions, are clear, if not a little blurry as they move between good and bad. There are cheers for the winners and a way of looking at the poorer choices as a sidetrack and not a dead end.
‘Ready For Confetti’ is Robert Earl Keen’s latest release. Like its namesake, the album fills the air with bright light sounds and colorful characters. The songs sparkle musically as the notes flow under Robert’s cushion of a voice. His vocals have a way of becoming so familiar and inclusive that the words can just as easily be coming from inside your head as out. Words of comfort are a distant radio signal drift in on “Lay
Down My Brother”, and then come so close that they can be a whisper in your ear. Coming of age and coming to grips with the way life slows down is laid out in “Paint the Town Beige”, peeling back the outside layer of settling down to show that inside desperado whose colors have gone pastel but still come up sharp in the light from an inner fire.
Robert Earl Keen debuted with ‘No Kinda Dancer’ in 1984. The Austin scene was giving birth to a singer/songwriter community that would see its songs land in country by default. The lines were hazy as the music took on a variety of folk, rock, blues, soul and country forms. Luckily, songwriters do not need to have a stamp on their work that grants it a genre, unlike radio programmers and sign makers. Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Gurf Morlix, Lucinda Williams, Blaze Foley and Robert Earl Keen joined the Texas outpouring of talent that emerged during the 1980’s and 1990’s, with songs that could claim lineage from different ways of setting music to beats. ‘Ready For Confetti’ keeps the meter rolling while cruising through rock, reggae, soul, country and blues licks and grooves.
Robert Earl Keen takes the lead role in “Who Do Man” and provides a laundry list of exit plans in “I Gotta Go” but when his words shoot arrows in the other direction, the power of the pen looms large. The guy at the receiving end of the finger-pointing judgments in “The Road Goes On and On” get an earful and the poor sucker with the “Top Down” may be riding along on a pink bubble of a pedal steel but you can bet he or she has ears burning and the hairs on their neck standing at attention.
The title track comes in on a Caribbean wave beat and deals out good examples of why you may want to take things a little less seriously and seek out the glasses that are half full. Robert Earl Keen can see a story in a shadow and has the knack of re-telling the tale so that the heroes can feel as good about their lives as those that live like the lead character in “Play A Train Song”. He knows where he stands in life, “I am a runaway locomotive out of my one track mind”, but damn, the scenery looks fine.
